by JediKnight12/2/07

Making planets is fairly easy by itself, 3 spheres textured with image maps from NASA. But what about those ones that are not in close proximity, and you don't want to have to go to all the trouble of making one yourself; here's how you can make planets using only procedural textures.

Okay, we all love to create space scenes. But what would a cool space scene be without a cool planet in it? Or even a few planets? Sure, there are quite a few cool hi-res planet maps out there on the internet, but it really becomes boring to see the same planets over and over again. Many people do their own planets but only do desert planets or gas giants that are relatively easy to do. With Lightwave's cool surfacing possibilities you can do an infinite amount of different planets by just using procedural texturing methods.

At this point I'd like to thank Dean Scott for the atmosphere method that showed me the great possibilities of Lightwave's gradients, which incidentally I use for this planet's atmosphere glow, too.

By tweaking the procedural texture settings you can create virtually every planet you need, from desert Dune-like planets to Earth-like 'Class M' planets. I will try here to cover the basics of procedural texturing by creating a planet with clouds and a nice little atmosphere glow using ONLY using procedurals and gradients in Lightwave.

banjogreen - 12/29/07I just finished this planet and it looks pretty nice. Thanks for an easy to follow tutorial.

[SHOCKWAVE] - 1/28/08The last paragraph made no sense to me and nothing happened when I added the 2 other alphas above the first 2 layers. Illustration would be great, it would help with the confusion.

ulimann644 - 5/10/08Good tutorial - the surface layer and the cloud layer works very good - but IŽd to modify some parameters for the atmosphere layer before I was satisfied with my rendered planets - I agree with Starbase and Cybit about illustrations...

mycophile - 3/25/09Thanks for a great tutorial. It has become a class assignment for my Lightwave students.

Pyroxis - 1/3/10Great tutorial, thanks.

edlwannabe - 6/8/12An important step that was left out:
When setting up both Gradients for the atmosphere layer, make sure you set the INPUT PARAMETER to "Incidence Angle". Otherwise you're not going to get the glow effect.